


floriography (or the secret language of flowers)

by Nimravidae



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst and Fluff, Grief/Mourning, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Vomiting, flowers flowers and more flowers, love confessions through flowers, through time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-29 21:09:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20088814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nimravidae/pseuds/Nimravidae
Summary: Flowers inexplicably grow around Crowley whenever he's in the throes of extreme emotions. Marigolds here, roses there, the occasional orchid and nettle.Funny then, the sorts of flowers he grows around Aziraphale.





	floriography (or the secret language of flowers)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weatheredlaw](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weatheredlaw/gifts).

> Shameless. I'm shameless.

The first time it happened, like most things, was in Eden. Back when he was still Crawly, long before he realized what he was capable of, long before he knew that the subconscious tendril flex of his Essence sprouted nothing into seeds into stems into flowers. He’d done it not long before his first step on his two legs, not long after he’d stopped being a snake and started being something entirely different.

He hadn’t meant to. The humans had already left the garden, there was nothing left for him to tempt, nothing left for him to do there but bother the angel with the fidgeting wings.

But when the angel said he’d given his sword away, very suddenly, a bush of blue and lavender roses started to unfurl from nothing at all. Crawly didn’t notice, neither did Aziraphale, the pair turned outwards to watch the first two humans struggle against the freshly-named lion.

No one noticed as the first raindrops caught on the petals of roses that were never intended to be.

The second time was under the first rainbow. Crawly sat, his feet buried in the half-dried sand that covered everything. Funny, how flood moves sediment, buries everything in both land and water. There was nothing left after The Flood, trees had been torn away, home swept, lives lost. Everything was sand and ash.

He’d tried to save who he could. Evacuate to the high grounds, to China, to Australia—anywhere but here, anywhere but where the rain refused to stop beating the ground, anywhere but here. With him.

The floodplains were empty and Crawly couldn’t save them all.

He sat there, elbows on his knees, head in his arms, and toes in the sun-hot sand and eyes closed. The shifting of ground beneath sandals and the sharp scent of Heaven and clean-burning fire slowly seeped up around him.

Like a tentative twitch of an upset angel’s Essence towards him. Slow and uncertain, like Crawly might lash out and snap. It might have been threatening if Crawly didn’t know it was Aziraphale.

For a moment, he debated doing just that—turning his head and baring his teeth and telling Aziraphale to go right ahead and fuck _all the way off. _His God did this, not Crawly’s. He didn’t have a God anymore. His toes sank further into the sand, further into the Earth. If he buries himself all the way down, maybe he’ll find some tenable ground again.

He didn’t snap, if only because he could feel the shudder at the edges of Aziraphale’s Essence. The wobble much like a lip that refused to stay stiff.

Crawly nodded and Aziraphale sat beside him, letting the quiet reign as the sky taunted them both with a blazing blue roaring overhead.

“I can’t apologize,” Aziraphale said, after the sun started to burn the blue into fierce oranges and reds. “You know that, Crawly.”

He didn’t lift his head, but he nodded again. “Don’t expect you to, angel.”

“Of course.” Of course.

He turned a sharp eye, towards him. Of course. The blue of his eyes seemed brighter when they swam with an angry red. His face was a bit puffy, nose rubbed raw (must’ve been hard for him to damage his vessel like that, Crawly thought. Must’ve taken a lot.) He tried his best not to let anything twinge in his chest at the sight of Aziraphale’s grief.

“You don’t have to apologize,” Crawly’s tongue worked up the words before he could think about them too much. All falling on some strange instinct that Crawly didn’t know he had. It flexed, and continued. “You didn’t drown them all.”

It was a fact, pure and simple. Aziraphale didn’t call up the rainstorms, he didn’t make the ground unable to keep up with the water. He didn’t bury hope and happiness alive under metric tons of sand and rushing water. Aziraphale didn’t drown anybody.

Beside him, Aziraphale sniffed and when Crawly glanced over, his face was buried in his hands, shoulders hitching. Demons, in general, were never really taught the intricacies of things like social graces and tact. Luckily, Crawly had been on Earth for quite some time by that point. He looked back down at the space between his knees, politely ignoring Aziraphale’s moment of mourning.

He’d had one himself, he’d had a thousand. When Aziraphale finished—his wasn’t long, some kind of brief crack in the facade of strength they both tended to keep up—he looked back up at the stars that were only just starting to flicker through the waning light of sunset.

“Seems like there’s more,” he said, through his wet sniffing. “Must just be that it’s been a while since we’ve seen them.”

Crawly looked back up towards the sky, blinking a few times and making note of all the things that were new and different. “There are more,” he said, watching a bird cutting shadows across a distant mountain.

There were about as many new stars as there were souls buried under sand and water.

Give or take.

Aziraphale didn’t respond, he just stared up at them until the sun fully went to rest and the moon hung in all her glory in its stead. They sat like that, entirely silent, until morning. The cold wash of the early light creeping across the eerily-empty plains towards them with an unrelenting regularity.

They didn’t speak, but they did reach out with energies beyond the veil of human sight. Light and Love brushed the frostbitten edges of Lightlessness and Lovelessness. A nominal comfort in the absence of anything else.

Morning came, and Aziraphale stood, shaking the sand from his robes. Crawly looked up in time to see the furrow of confusion as he stared down at the floor. Slowly, a smile broke out, the glowing, brilliant, blinding, smile. The sort of that Crawly only ever saw when Aziraphale had spotted someone doing a bit of inspired Good.

“Funny,” he said, voice a little rough. “Life seems to find a way, doesn’t it?”

Crawly blinked. Life finds a—what? He whipped his head around and, well. That was interesting. He blinked a few times—more blinks than he had remembered to do in nearly a decade all within a few breaths.

The space between them had sprouted with green and pink, bursting up from sand that should not have been arable. Azaleas. A whole bush of them. “Huh,” Crawly said, as Aziraphale glanced up towards the skies.

Receiving orders, judging by the wince and nod. “I’ve got to—” He gestured up and Crawly waved him off in a sort of _go on. _

He flinched at the ripple of light that meant Aziraphale was gone, a quick burning moment of pure Holy Light and then there was nothing. Nothing but Crawly and a bush that shouldn’t have ever been there.

“Where,” he asked the flowers, bony fingers dancing around one of the delicate little buds, “did you come from?”

The flowers didn’t answer, if just, perhaps, because they themselves did not know either.

In Golgotha, they worked together in a tender silence, side-by-side with a scant handful of equally speechless humans. Crowley held an end of white cloth in tight hands as Aziraphale guided Christ’s body down.

The entire affair, they never spoke a word, but as they left the entombment, the trail was pocked with lilies.

In Rome it was Rush Daffodils—brilliant and yellow and utterly baffling to everyone present, Crowley included. They’d started bursting from the soil before Crowley so much as stepped outside. By the time he was sitting across from Aziraphale in Patroneous’ restaurant, staring Aziraphale down across a plate of oysters, he’d forgotten the whole thing

It was twenty years later when Crowley realized what was happening. 79 A.D., one of the few times Earth looked properly hellish. Black and red sludge of molten rock (_lava _they called it), thick smoke and the stench of burning. Bits of ash fluttered down, turning Aziraphale's stark-blond hair grey. He sat on a bench, too clean and too pristine to have been then where Vesuvius erupted.

"It was—"

"Yeah," Crowley said, sitting beside him. There wasn't space originally but there was then. "Did you know? That this was happening?"

Aziraphale shook his head. "Was just," he waved his hand, "nature. I tried to—I wasn't here."

Crowley understood that. "You couldn't have done much," he said. It was a cold comfort, they both knew it. The lava solidified by their feet, politely oozing around them and cooling back into rock. It was probably hot, but they were imagining it wasn’t quite hot enough.

“I could have saved people, Crowley. A few more.”

“Right,” he replied, looking down at his hands. “Could’ve. But you’d be right here, mourning those you couldn’t.”

Aziraphale looked up towards the skies, hazy and far with the thick stormcloud of smoke lingering around them. “Like you were in Mesopotamia?”

He didn’t look up, but he could feel when Aziraphale turned to look at him. There was no bite, no dagger of accusation lurking under sleeve. It was a genuine question. _Is that what you were doing? Is this how you felt? _

Crowley swallowed around the knot in his throat. “Yeah.” He looked up instead of at Aziraphale, not ready to see the blue of skies and rivers quite yet. Up above him was a whole lot of nothing.

“S’what I did.”

“Thank you,” Aziraphale told him, eventually turning his face back up. Crowley knew they were seeing different things—if he remembered hard enough he was certain he could see what Aziraphale saw. He didn’t. He didn’t want to.

Thanking a demon was and always would be something incredibly stupid. “For what?”

“Sitting with me.”

Crowley looked back over the destruction and the ruination. If he squinted, he could see the house of a woman he met the last time he’d been here. His stomach sank as he thought of her, her bread, her husband, her four kids. He liked to think they made it out. “Not a problem, angel.” His voice was weak, a bit strained.

The sat for nearly another hour. Aziraphale left and Crowley stayed, staring down between his feet where a little yellow tulip poked up from the hardened lava between them. It bust through the stone all but it’s lonesome.

The shame tasted like bile in the back of his throat as he watched it bloom and stare back up at him. Yellow tulips — hopeless love. Squeezing his eyes shut, he tried to feel himself, to feel everywhere his Essence was, including where it wrapped, unbidden, around the edges of the flower—willing it to life.

Bursting it from nothing.

“Great,” he told the tulip. “Just great.” Relentlessly, it grew.

“Last time I let that happen.”

It took all his focus on ignoring the tugging in his chest the next time he saw Aziraphale, over a dinner at some low-light place, to avoid another spontaneous bouquet of something — of course he only succeeded in focusing to hard and catching the edges of his sleeve on fire. Aziraphale put it out with his hand, gripping tightly to Crowley’s arm—skin touching skin as the fabric pushed up.

A concerning amount of ragweed grew and bloomed at once, like a reflexive twist of his Essence—Aziraphale sneezed so hard a nearby baby born deaf regained his hearing.

“What was _that,” _he’d asked, gently touching the space beneath his nose, hand having dropped from Crowley’s arm and Crowley’s heat _thrummed _in his chest.

His eyes bulged behind his dark glasses. “Er—a little...I was on fire. I didn’t mean to.”

Aziraphale couldn’t summon the grace to not look shocked. “That was you?”

“An accident.”

“An accident,” Aziraphale echoed.

Crowley sniffed, looked around them at the pollen settling down over them like a blanket of his accidental affection. “Yeah. What of it?”

Azirpahale plucked a bit from his sleeve. “Nothing, I just didn’t think it was something a demon could do.”

His nose wrinkled a bit, but he pretended like it was just the flowers and not at all the implication. “Well, I did it,” he said, fixing the singe in his sleeve with a dark look.

They didn’t mention it again. They didn’t mention when they both ended up at Ptolmey’s death, when Cyprus trees stretched up towards the skies. Or when Aziraphale and he sat and watched the birds dip and twist and fly in Sardinia—wine between them, the sun glinting off Aziraphale’s skin and catching up in his hair as they watched still skies stretch above them and the restless water roll out endlessly on the horizon. Orchids grew then, popping up between rocks and sand.

Aziraphale noticed, Crowley noticed him noticing, noticed him stroking down the length of a bud with gentle, too-tender fingers. It still bruised, because orchids were too delicate to know, to feel and touch.

Years later it was Acacia.

It was Crowley watching Aziraphale feed birds in a place he couldn’t remember the names of while purple lilacs sprung up from the stone around them.

It was lemon blossoms when Aziraphale brushed his hair back and chided him that it was getting too long. It was arbutus growing down and hanging from the doorway above them as they met in secrecy in 1150.

When the 14th-century came around, it was _Amaranthus caudatus. _Foxtail Amaranth, tassel flower. Crowley had been in the same town for a few years, had been not so much laying root as just bopping about, running some low-level jobs and simply existing for the time being.

Very suddenly it as very empty. Skin bubbled and pitted and _rotted _off the living. The town filled with a rank stench of death and decay and something so unholy that there was no way it originated from the pits of Hell. He watched as in what felt like a moment, an instant to an immortal creature, everyone was gone.

Families, workers, preachers, medicine-men. Everyone. He was drinking alone, at a table overcome with the dripping loveless flowers, when Aziraphale found him.

They sat in utter silence. Aziraphale cleared the blossoms from the chair and sat across from him.

Crowley poured him a glass and they didn’t speak a word. It reminded him of Mesopotamia, made him think of tests and right answers and wrong answers. It made him think of the way he could still feel the bodies that long turned to bone to dust under the salted wound of the floodplains. He never wanted to go back, never wanted to feel their restless spirits begging for mercy that would never come.

When Crowley left the little town on the edges of nowhere, he burned it all. Then not even his flowers could grow.

Then it was nothing, then it was the flex that Crowley knew meant a flower had grown somewhere it shouldn’t whenever he saw Aziraphale. Something that sprouted from nothing and withered eventually into dust. Long after it should have.

Then it was everything. 1478. They couldn’t even make it two centuries without another plague—but this one wasn’t carried with rats and fleas, this one was wielded by Torquemada and the inquisitors that terrorized. 1478 was anemones, brightly coloured buttercups unfitting for the time. 1478 was anemones, 1479, 1480. His commendation came and he laid it in the soil of another mass grave, another salted-Earth story of God’s unwillingness to intervene.

He buried the writ and medal and laid flowers at their feet and got spectacularly drunk. Really absolutely pissed—more drunk than Crowley thought a demon could properly get. This time, Aziraphale didn’t find him, he found Aziraphale. Stumbling, heels dragging with rough falls and faults all through the town, he actually landed on him.

His boot hit a particularly well-set rock and sent him tumbling into preternaturally strong arms, sent his dark-tinted glasses skittering down the walk path and left him staring up at deeply worried eyes.

Anemones grew from the cracks all around them as Aziraphale’s gaze hardened.

“I heard you got a commendation,” he said—cold and empty. His hands were tight on Crowley’s elbows but he could feel them shaking. Rage. Sadness maybe. “Congratulations.”

There was a twitch to the hold, like for a moment Aziraphale considered shucking him off and leaving him to rot in the gutter and oh—oh just the _idea _of that made the wine want to make a second appearance. Something unnatural churned in his gut, something fluttery and wrong and oh—oh.

“Oh, _God,” _Aziraphale gasped, immediately snapping one arm back from Crowley’s body as he hunched and vomited up nothing but those buttercup petals. Perfect, unbruised, and seemingly endless from the pits of his being. All black and red. He dry heaved as Aziraphale lowered him slowly, carefully to the ground, letting him gasp and cough up more, more, until there was a puddle of them right there in the streets.

Crowley really wished he knew what it meant. He wished harder than he didn’t know what he meant.

Collecting all his sharp edges and angles, Crowley sat there, head between his knees. The breaths he didn’t need came shuddering up from lungs that felt heavy with all the flowers he couldn’t expel.

“Look,” he croaked, fingers too-tightly in his dried-blood locks, “look what they're _doing.” _

He couldn’t say anything else, he couldn’t do anything but let the sobs overtake him as warm arms wrap around his shoulders and hold him fast. “It wasn’t your fault,” Aziraphale said, as the realization came to him. “It wasn’t your fault, Crowley.”

The flowers wouldn’t stop coming, rainflowers and anemones and fields of rue.

It was all Crowley could make for _years. _

Until the Globe, until he made gorse bloom up under his heels. Until France, with the forget-me-nots clinging to the wooden posts. Until the opening of the bookshop where ylang-ylang crawled in through every window until Aziraphale had given Crowley a look to make them stop.

There were times in between, there were times when it was just the two of them in the park, a clandestine meeting pocked with flowers and blooms and trees shaking down peach blossoms over them in the middle of winter. Things that never should have happened.

Crowley never should have learned Floriography. He picked it up sometime in the 19th-century, swallowing his tongue when he saw all the flowers he made, everything he pulled up from under the skin of the Earth laid before before him.

Grose, love in all seasons, forget-me-nots, true love. Red tulips, undying passions. Ylang-ylang, undying love. Daisies meant love, so did daffodils of all sort and primrose that blossomed when Crowley and Aziraphale first went to the Ritz. The Balsam that grew the first time Crowley touched Aziraphale’s hand, the moonflower that constantly filled his flat whenever he tried to banish the angel from his thoughts using nothing but his hand. Love. Love. Love.

Who knew so many damned flowers meant _love. _

He tried to wrestle it down, he tried to keep himself tampered to keep that urging blossom of affection choked away from anywhere Aziraphale could notice him. If he did—Aziraphale would run. He’d run so far, away from where hellfire eyes could try to peel back all the secrets he was keeping.

He’d run to places Crowley couldn’t find him.

The bombed out shell of Saint Michaels grew lavender and purple lilacs.

He couldn’t hide it—he couldn’t stop the surge him of him that shot outwards whenever he tried to tamper down what he was keeping at bay. The Bentley wouldn’t stop growing yellow roses for weeks from the tape deck after the incident with the Holy Water. Crowley wrenched them out and burned them again and again.

On the bandstand, on the verge of another thunderstorm. _I don’t even like you._

Crowley’s footsteps filled with marigolds, rotting and withering they were never made right. They were never made pure.

Nothing grew from the ashes of the bookshop.

Nothing grew in the pub he drowned his sorrows in.

But Crowley could feel his lungs filling with black roses and columbine. Death. Faithlessness. They crawled like ivy up into his throat.

All he could taste was the botanics on his tongue.

All he could taste was the rot of decaying flowers.

He didn’t start growing them again until he had time, until he was back in his own skin, in his own flat, in his own mind. Until after the apocalypse didn’t happen and after the world didn’t end. For a minute he was concerned there, worried that he’d lost all his ability to feel them. Worried that Hell cut him off and he’d never grow another little blossom again.

That sort of anxiety didn’t sit well with him exactly. Sure, the little buggers were annoying as—well as annoying as weeds, he supposed. But you spend six thousand years with a tick and see if you don’t miss it when suddenly it’s been wrenched away from you.

Orchids poked up in his flat when Aziraphale first stepped in, it clung to the edges of his couch—uncomfortable and flat and hard—as they sat there drinking and not talking. Aziraphale plucked it, twirling it around in his fingers.

“I’ve kept these,” he said. “Y’know. I wonder—they burned up.”

“You kept the orchids?” Crowley asked, deep into a fifth glass of wine.

Aziraphale spun it again, watching the petals move. “Your flowers. I think I started with the rush daffodils in Rome. I kept them pressed, preserved.”

Crowley swallowed, throat bobbing. “Oh.”

They’re probably gone now. He doesn’t say it, but he agreed. They’re gone, nothing but ash and dust. Like the Bentley, like their futures.

Crowley watched Aziraphale watch the flower for a long while before sighing and waving a hand. He conjured a dictionary—something heavy, something that would get the job done.

“There you are, angel,” he said, getting up to pass the thing off like it was going to burn him. “Have at it. New start right now.”

A smile tugged at the edges of Aziraphale’s lips. Crowley couldn’t help but follow suit. “Right. A new start.”

Right, Crowley didn’t say again. A new start.

Aziraphale’s fingers brushed softly down the back of Crowley’s fingers as he took the book. He swallowed, look at him like he was going to—to do something, but what, Crowley didn’t know.

All he could imagine was flowers, flowers beyond comprehension, flowers that didn’t exist and flowers that wouldn’t ever exist.

Aziraphale took the book and set it aside.

A new start.

Right now.

When Aziraphale kissed him, Crowley managed a single sprig of bellflower, growing inexplicably out of the empty wine bottle between them.

It was hours later, with Aziraphale pushing Crowley down into the river of silk sheets that flowed over his bed, that things started to get out of hand.

Crowley’s fingers grappled for Aziraphale’s buttons, his fingers sliding under his shirt and pushing out deep red rose petals and matching wine-dark carnation buds. Where they got nudged off the bed as Aziraphale straddled Crowley's hips, new ones started to sprout. They rose up from the concrete floor of his bedroom as vines started to climb the posts of the bed.

As he gasped, Aziraphale’s lips at his throat, the smell of fresh-cut grass overwhelmed him. He didn’t need to open his eyes as fingers undo his belt to know that his bedroom floor has been overtaken.

All he could think of was how much he wanted to do this before, how much he wanted to touch that stunning sliver of light that stood there waiting and watching on the wall. How every memory of Aziraphale in the sun wrenched him back to that moment like a riptide. He can feel the burst of globe amaranth, of clovenlip toadflax that started to appear from inside his closet.

The memories, the sight of him there, it dragged him under kicking and screaming until he was there, staring at Aziraphale in the center of the garden.

The aster that descended from the ceiling amongst leaves from trees that started up from nothing and —in just a few short moments, just in the time it took for Aziraphale and Crowley to bare themselves, in the time it took them to cling to one another—the trees have burst forth and stretched to the roof.

The window shattered as vines consumed the side of his building, as they reached into the flat and crawled up the sides of the bed, pockmarked with pansies.

Crowley could smell the overtaking clove that grew out of his bedside table as the edges of the vines and leaves and flowers started to become much too noticeable. Aziraphale pulled back, lips kiss-red and slick, looking about with wild, familiar eyes.

“It looks like—”

Crowley had tossed an arm over his eyes, trying not to look. All he could think of was _him. _Aziraphale _there. _

The moment they met in Eden.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale pressed when he didn’t respond.

“Hnf,” was all he could offer at the moment, something half-dismissive and choked.

The vines wouldn’t stop, neither would the trees, already churning their peach and apple and lemon blossoms into fruit to hang heavy and ripe inside his flat. The flowers kept blooming until the sickly sweet scent of them was too much to bear.

“Is this—”

“I can’t stop it, angel,” he said because—well he wouldn’t so readily say he tried more than he just...didn’t want to stop it. “I don’t want to.”

Aziraphale leaned back down, hands smoothing down Crowley’s bare skin. His flesh ached, itched, and he swallowed around the flowers that didn’t have names, the ones that never saw the light of day, the ones that only ever grew in his throat. “You’re making us our own Eden?”

“It _was _the first time I saw you,” Crowley said, his own fingers bumping half-blind and numb up towards the back of Aziraphale’s head. He stroked through his hair, thumbed along his cheekbone. “Can’t blame me for imagining it so many times.”

Whatever cheeky comment Crowley had in response to whatever cheeky comment he assumed Aziraphale was going to make was lost under the press of lips back on his own, of the grind of skin and flesh and bodies.

Around them, the garden surged and continued growing and somewhere between the chest of drawers and an original, signed, Monet, there grew a bush of lavender and blue roses.

**Author's Note:**

> Flowers for you and flowers for YOU and FLOWERS FOR EVERYONE
> 
> I'm on [Tumblr](https://tooeasilyconsidered.tumblr.com/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/hipsteroric)


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